1. Nancy Gertner was born on May 22,1946 and is an American lawyer and jurist who was a United States district judge of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 1994 until retiring in 2011.
17 Facts About Nancy Gertner
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Nancy Gertner is a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.
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Nancy Gertner's father, Moishe Gertner, owned a linoleum business; her mother Sadie Gertner was a housewife.
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Nancy Gertner's family lived in a tenement until she was seven years old, when they moved to Flushing, New York.
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Nancy Gertner received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1967 and a Master of Arts and a Juris Doctor from Yale University and Yale Law School, respectively, in 1971.
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Nancy Gertner began her legal career in 1971 as a law clerk for Judge Luther Swygert of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
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On October 27,1993, on the recommendations of Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, Gertner was nominated to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Bill Clinton to a seat vacated by A David Mazzone.
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Nancy Gertner was confirmed by the Senate on February 10,1994, and received her commission on February 14,1994.
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Nancy Gertner assumed senior status on May 22,2011, and retired on September 1,2011.
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Nancy Gertner was named a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States by President Joe Biden on April 9,2021.
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Judge Gertner presided over Sony BMG v Tenenbaum, a civil trial in which the Recording Industry Association of America accused Joel Tenenbaum, a Massachusetts college student, of illegally downloading and sharing files, thus violating US copyright law.
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In July 2009, a jury awarded $675,000 to the music companies, but Judge Nancy Gertner later reduced the award to $67,500, stating that arbitrarily high statutory damages violate due process and are thus unconstitutional.
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Nancy Gertner describes the Saxe trial as her first big case.
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Nancy Gertner is to date the only Massachusetts judge to post to a personal blog.
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Nancy Gertner published her memoirs, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, in 2011.
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Nancy Gertner is married to John Reinstein, former Legal Director for the Massachusetts ACLU.
17.
In October 2015, Gertner became the subject of media attention in the Boston area when an escaped cockatoo did considerable damage to her Brookline residence, a historic Victorian home which happened to be the birthplace of Robert F Kennedy.